


Dieux et Miroirs

by Ethike_arete



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, French History RPF, French Revolution RPF
Genre: Consensual Infidelity, Consensual Violence, Cynicism, Infidelity, M/M, Possessive Behavior, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 05:40:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15790077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ethike_arete/pseuds/Ethike_arete
Summary: 1793:  Camille is losing touch with the Revolution (with everything, really, that isn't Danton).  Where once he had seen heroes who might become the gods of their age, mirrors of the people's goodness, now he only sees men who are as fallible as he is.  With Danton lost in grief and anger at the death of his wife, Camille breaks the last edifice of the temple he erected to the man.





	Dieux et Miroirs

**Author's Note:**

> Technically speaking- while very different in tone- this little piece is part of _Les Saisons_ , though it can be read separately. An addendum, I guess, would be the best way of describing it. In effect, I wanted Camille's 'private and shameful vice' to stand separately from how Danton and Robespierre discuss the matter, so here we are.

_It is an age when everyone claims to be the mirror, rather than accepting they are the reflection._

  
  
Camille Desmoulins sat back at his desk and studied the line he had written.  Would a reader understand, though?  He had been thinking, after all, of Versailles and its hall of mirrors.  He remembered how the light bounced off every surface, every motion echoed on glass and silver, gold and diamond.  How those spoiled creatures had wanted to see their image everywhere, how infatuated they were with their own beauty, each step they turned giving themselves back to themselves.  The endless sources of reflection created an illusion of infinite space, though the courtiers were confined by the same stone walls as anyone else: like toys thrown into a particularly pretty box, seeing true boundlessness only when their gaze met the sky over the guillotine.  
  
The Revolution was different.  Each man saw himself as a mirror of the age, so devoid of personal desire that they became a looking glass in which the people saw their goodness, their strength, their sacrifice, all of it, reflected back.  The representatives are now the hall of mirrors.  They are glass.  They are silver.  They are gold.  Not one of them considered himself a mere reflection of the age, a cheap copy, a reproduction with only the scant variations of God’s errors.  And so they, too, became trapped, within less clearly defined boundaries.  At times- at the Cordeliers, at the Jacobins- Camille found himself struck by it: the ways in which they mimicked one another, the ways in which all their language sounded the same.  Reflections of reflections, just like Versailles.

  
*

  
_In reality there are only three mirrors of the age,_ Camille wrote, _and one has broken already._  
  
The first had been Marat: fierce and volatile, sharp-tongued and quick-witted.  Oh, how Camille longed to wield his pen the way Marat had, like the keenest of all swords, each word as merciless and clean as the fall of the guillotine’s blade.  Marat was the stones of the Bastille and the heads of de Launay and Flesselles waved above the parading victors, he was the brave women of the march on Versailles, he was the foul muck of the sewers and the blood flowing like rivers from Saint-Germain-des-Prés.  He had been love, too, generous and warm.  Love for the _patrie_ and the people.  He had loved his friends, those few who remained by his side to the end.  He had loved his wife more deeply and with greater sincerity of oath, even, than Camille could say he loved Lucile.  
  
The second was Maximilien Robespierre: the emanation of _vertu_ itself, an idea made flesh, devoted with every part of his being to the Revolution.  _Liberté, égalité, fraternité et pureté._   The consummate orator, no matter how thin his voice or how often he stood tip-toe upon the rostrum.  Dauntless in his courage and incapable, to the depths of his very heart, of any form of corruption.  Robespierre was the wind blowing through an ancient tennis court in Versailles, the struggling voice for peace as the dogs bayed war, the inflexible force of the law, the tears of the people as they wept.  Here, however, the mirror of the world blurred, at least for Camille.  Robespierre was Robespierre, but he was also Maxime.  Maxime who was poetry and oranges, grace and sweat-soaked beds, the indulgent godfather bouncing Horace upon his bony knee, the ballast that kept Camille from capsizing.  He was the mirror in which Camille no longer saw his own reflection.  
  
And then there was Danton.  
  
Danton the man.  Danton the beast.  He could be neither, or either, or both, depending upon circumstance.  Danton was the people fleeing the bullets in the Champ de Mars and their thundering, new-found voice at the tribune, he was justice in all its mercy and all its severity, he was the strength and the solidity of all the Mountain and its beating, troubled heart in turmoil.  He was scars and strong wine licked from the chin, he was Autumn sun and the good, rich earth of France, he was the love of women and pleasure and the picture of grief hunched screaming over an open grave.  He was one of the loves of Camille’s life, one full-beating half of his heart.  The other half, of course, belonged to Lucile, but Camille's heart was a voracious thing- barely less so than his body- and so he gave it sincerely and with absolute abandon to both of them.  
  
The Revolution was all these men, these mirrors, these gods even.    
  
_And so,_ thought Camille, _am I, if I go with them._

  
  
*

  
  
For all the chaos, the constant whirl of events, the lies and betrayals and the loves, the Revolution and the people in it had worn thin by 1793.  Camille felt at times as though he had died and now walked amongst the Asphodel Meadows, passing insubstantial shadows fed on sacrifice.  Supping first the blood of those who had leached their own and now, addicted to its salt, drawing even from the veins of their friends.  
  
And then there was Camille himself, and there was Saint-Just.  The both of them just poor shades trying, by some miracle of transubstantiation, to become solid and real.  Trying- he was not too proud to admit- to be worthy of the great men they loved.  
  
Camille was not yet lost enough in this underworld of their own creation to forget their living past.  He remembered himself back in those early days: wild and passionate and filled with ideas and dreams.  He remembered Saint-Just, too: not yet a deputy, just an untrammeled boy who sang and turned fierce, laughed then turned cold as the north wind.  
  
Back then, Camille never thought himself the mirror of the age, but he had wanted desperately to be its voice.  God, how he had adored the passionate words that spilled from Saint-Just’s quill, from his lips, traced by his hands.  How they echoed his own in style and substance.  And then, when they shared a budding friendship, how Camille had adored the voice with which Saint-Just spoke to him.  How he had adored his own reflection in those huge, dark eyes so like his own.  How he had longed to be worshiped by him in every way imaginable.  
  
It was not in Saint-Just’s nature, however- any more than it was in Camille’s- to want half measures.  Saint-Just’s eyes soon turned to God, the word of the Revolution made flesh, and not to Camille.  Camille had made mistakes with him, then.  He had said unworthy things of Maxime, murmured half-truths and juvenile memories into the ivory shell of Saint-Just’s ear.  Drunk, one night, he had been foolish and crude.  He had tried too hard to see his reflection in Saint-Just’s eyes and found nothing there but the cold and dark.  And really, now, it all made sense: what was he, that night, but some poor Narcissus seeking the lips of his reflection?  The rain trying to return to the cloud from which it fell?  
  
Well, then, let Saint-Just press his kisses upon Maxime’s thin, stone mouth.  Let him have his incorruptible, virtuous saint.  Perhaps, after all, Saint-Just was one of those men who preferred the longing to the act, who took more pleasure from pain than suffering from pleasure.  Camille wanted his own god: not the calm, steady divinity of Reason and Englightenment, but a pagan god of the world and the flesh, the force of nature itself, bloodier in tooth and claw than Maxime could ever know.

  
  
*

  
_The problem,_ Camille wrote, _is that it is in our nature to make gods of mere men.  And once gods are mere men, it is in our nature to both love and destroy them._    
  
In his thirty-three years, Camille had witnessed the cycle of many such gods: the King, Lafayette, Marat.  Loved once, all three, and brought down by the very people who had once worshiped at their feet.  Within the Revolutionary pantheon, as within dead pantheons gone before, new gods rose in their place to be adored and reviled, loved and torn down.  Their blood was like the blood of Tammuz, a source of fertility, of regeneration, necessary to the force of change.  
  
Gods- and their worship along with them- evolved.  At least, so Camille believed both from the Classics and his own observations.  Suppose one began with an imposing physical landmark, something noticeable to the people of that area that provoked wonder and curiousity and- soon enough- a mythos of its very own.  Soon after, what had once been only a venerated rock might be imbued with a soul or spirit, some protective and vengeful will entirely independent of its physical nature, but insubstantial as the human soul.  Finally, there developed a figurehead and a faith: a personhood in whom the worshiper must put their trust, and for whom they made the appropriate offerings, said the right words, expressed the correct forms of love and devotion.  
  
Camille, when he considered the matter- which he did often, and with no small measure of bemused curiousity- knew that his love for Danton followed much the same pattern.  It had begun, he supposed, the first day he had stood encompassed within the safety of the older man’s shadow.  When he had leaned his arm against the great, solid mass of him- as big as a mountain, as stark and broken and scarred- and Danton had not given way.  Perhaps, even, it had been in the Champ de Mars, that fateful day when Camille’s other favoured deity had been conspicuously absent.  That day when Danton had thrown his great arm around his back and hauled him in to his chest, entirely willing to be shot for his sake.  Yes, then, when Camille had looked up into that ursine face and seen nothing but gentle curiosity, as though surprised to find so small a thing sheltering within the vastness of his arms.  The first time Camille had made dignity of those scars and beauty of his imposing frame.  From there it was only a very short step, after all, to appreciating the soul of the man: traits that he’d once found unappealing smoothed of their roughest edges, a growing sense that his flashes of anger- rare as they were- had purpose and necessity.  
  
And now?  Now where was he but pouring libations and speaking in prayers?  Defending his faith to all and sundry like a saint on the verge of martyrdom?  Where was he, really, but on his knees in the temple of his heart?  Where was he but on his knees looking up and praying for a glimpse of his reflection in the eyes of God.

  
  
*

  
  
It was Gabrielle’s death that blooded Danton.  
  
He had taken so many wounds in his life, and Camille knew them all.  Some were physical, worn with pride.  Most formed the growing weights of denunciation and calumny, the pressure of their work, a waning sense of purpose.  Those settled over Danton like a mantle, bearing down the broad shoulders that might have carried the world.  Gabrielle’s death, though, was the spear that pierced his great heart; that sent the blood rushing from him in a torrent for his enemies to feast upon: Danton weak, Danton confused, Danton stripped of tusks and teeth.  
  
It was then that Camille stood over him: hunter and lover, worshiper and heathen.  He was not without feeling, not at all.  Rather, the tangled threads of affection that he felt for the man had became a knot in his chest, his belly.  A knot he couldn't find the ends of let alone untie.  
  
A better man would withdraw.  A better man would follow all the proper forms and expectations.  A better man had: Camille, after all, knew the words of Robespierre’s loving letter of condolence by heart.    
  
Camille was not a better man.  Camille was slipping in spilled blood, down on his knees in it.  Close enough, at times, to dip his fingers in and pull the wound wide; his hands red-stained as a bachante’s.  There were times during those early days- so many, in fact, that he lost count- when Camille lay down beside the great beast.  He lay so close that they shared every shaking breath.  So close Camille heard it fill those massive lungs and rattle through every exhalation.  He looked into Danton’s small, storm-coloured eyes and watched each steady, slow blink and how they clenched with sudden pain, or sparkled with unshed tears.  How they watched his face with the wary acceptance of a beaten dog.  
  
Not once did Camille initiate touch.  The wounded beast, after all, is often quick to attack even the most helping of hands.  At some point, though, Danton bridged the slim gap between their bodies to hold him at the elbow.  This very little thing was like the first strike of a flint that starts a conflagration.  The next time they touched was on the bed.  Camille remembered: he had set himself a little further apart, the blue coverlet like a sea separating their bodies, so that Danton must stretch further, pull him closer.  He went, of course he did.    
  
And then came that night on the floor of Danton's salon: Danton’s hulking form bent almost double, his face pressed to the stone while he groaned and wept.  And Camille, good friend, obedient reflection, lay opposite him in silence.  Danton’s hand moved towards him, disembodied by the black of his coat, seeking his arm.  Camille shifted away.  Not so much that Danton would notice, but enough to remain barely beyond reach: again, again, like the retreating tide.  Lost in grief and frustration, the longing for friendship and human warmth, Danton reared up onto his hands and knees.  Crawled to Camille.  Gathered him up from the floor as he had gathered his dead wife from her grave, dragged him up and then threw him down, crushing him between the massive heat and weight of his body and the unforgiving cold of the floor.  Camille was winded, frozen with relief and unexpected desire and some nameless, terrible joy.  And then Danton wrapped him up in both of his arms, so that the whole of Camille’s world was the scent and weight of him.  
  
“Camille,” he said, even his hoarse whisper sounding more like a roar at this distance.  “Thank God, thank God.”  
  
“I’m no God, Georges,” he managed to laugh, despite that iron grip around his ribs.  _I haven’t the talent or the kindness.  But you are.  My God, you are._  
  
“Shut up, Camille.”  His hand, rough and heavy on the side of Camille’s neck, an unintentional threat because Georges never knew his own strength or understood why others feared it so much.  “You are not allowed to die without me.  Do you hear me, little bastard?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Danton’s fingers tangled in the loose curls around Camille’s shoulders.  Thinking of his dead wife, maybe.  Thinking of it being cut for the guillotine.  Camille shuddered and Danton moaned in a way that was no longer all about sorrow.  
  
“My good friend.  Dear Camille,” Danton said.  “God, I love you.”  
  
And Camille surged up at that, at least as much as floor and body and Danton allowed.  Wrapped his arms around the other man’s neck and pressed their bodies together from hip to cheek, legs tangled on the floor.  His hands found the thick, coarse waves of the older man’s hair and stroked it as gently as he stroked Lucile’s curls, which tended to tangle and tear so easily.  Danton went very still then, his whole body trembling with strain.  
  
“Shh,” Camille said.  He kissed the corner of Danton’s eye where it creased with age and exhaustion and sorrow, allowing but the very tip of his tongue to taste the salt that lingered there.  And then he shifted- childish Camille- and buried his face in the soft folds of Danton’s thick neck, nuzzling at coarse stubble.  
  
“Good Camille,” Georges murmured.  “My sweet, gentle friend.  You feel…”  
  
He hadn’t needed to end the sentence, because his hands pressed and squeezed every part of Camille’s body within reach, intimate in their avoidance of intimacy.  Because Camille had known plenty of men like this, who wouldn’t dream of touching another man right up until the very moment they did.  Until they could convince themselves it was only about dead wives or frigid maidens, Camille’s long, soft hair and big eyes, the way that he gave and he gave and he gave.  
  
Well, Camille could afford to give.  He could afford to give because he had made God Himself crawl to his worship.    
  


*       

  
They didn’t fuck immediately, he and Danton, but the threat of it thickened the air between them.  It shifted their hierarchy in a way Camille never imagined.  Here they were: Camille the naive waif, Camille the child, Camille the foolish had toppled the great and powerful Danton.  It was a purely private revolt, but like all revolutions the conclusion was this: the king must die.  
  
Camille waited and savored the waiting.  Tortured himself with brushed hands and pressed arms, the way Danton draped over him at his desk or crowded him against walls.  He watched Danton’s face, watched his temper fray and his impatience grow, unsated by his new, young wife.  He watched his own reflection in Danton’s eyes, observing, almost, his own inexorable capitulation.  
  
This time, it was Camille who extended his hand.  
 

  
*

  
  
“What now, Camille?”  
  
A crisp Autumn evening, and like the leaves turning brown outside Camille’s window, Danton was tired and defeated.  The house was empty but for the two of them, Camille had ensured it, and Danton stood in the doorway entirely as planned, filling its generous frame.  As Camille rose from his writing desk and turned to face him directly, Danton’s gaze shifted away, taking in the curtained bed, the empty shell of one of Lucile’s dresses lying over a chair.  Back, then, to Camille: his untucked shirt, his loose curls barely contained by one of Lucile’s ribbons.  There was a trick, Camille had learned, to seducing men like Danton, and it employed a kind of artifice Fabre would have been proud to see: these minute, coaxing suggestions of femininity, familiar enough to make the situation less threatening.  Danton would never desire a Saint-Just or a Billaud, but Camille was an entirely different matter.  Even the furled softness of his name suggested it.  Like a woman, he was a trifle to be taken lightly, to be coddled and embraced.  
  
Slow across the floor, like taming a bird to the hand.  A hand that Camille lifted and brought down to cup the fullness of Danton’s right cheek, his thumb nesting in the deep line of scar tissue there as if to open it up all over again.  He had to rise onto his toes to press his kisses, open-mouthed: one to the side of Danton's neck, then his jaw, and finally to the end of the scar.  Danton’s breath became an indrawn roar that crested like a wave, bringing them chest-to-chest.  When Danton reached out it was not to touch him.  Camille knew it wouldn’t be.  It was to wrap his fingers around the ends of Lucile’s ribbon and thumb the silk.  
  
_Do that, exactly that, to my cock,_ Camille thought.  He stepped back and rolled down onto the flat of his feet.  The ribbon slipped from his hair to dangle from Danton’s hand like a victory banner, though the victory was all Camille’s.  What he said instead was, “Louise is a child, Georges.”  
  
Danton gave a loud, wet-sounding snort.  “What are you getting at?”  
  
Camille tilted his head.  “It must have hurt her, the first time.”  
  
“Camille…”  
  
“It hurt me, the first time.  And he was not you, nowhere near you.”  He took a step back.  Another.  Watched thought play like light and shadow across Danton’s face.  “I didn’t know what I was doing, or he didn’t.  Both.”  
  
“Why say this now, of all times?”  
  
“You were gentle, I trust.”  
  
“Always.  Stop…”  
  
“You would have made her love it.  Women pursue Maxime because he has no desire for them, but they pursue you because they know you’ll leave them satisfied.”  
  
“Is that why I can never get at Lucile?  Because you satisfy her instead?”  
  
It was a cheap attempt at deflection that Camille parried with a smile.  “I’m generous.  And besides, though I’m sure the experiences have their little differences, I know what it’s like to be fucked.”  
  
He let that last word fly, sharp as a slap.  That word alone brought Danton stumbling over the threshold, one step closer, no more.  Camille knew it would: Danton was not generous, after all, unless it pleased him to be.  He might share his body with every woman in Paris, but each one of them was his and had on his own terms.  Men, though, were unfamiliar.  Camille saw the questions forming on that heavy face: who, how many, when…?

“You wouldn’t be cruel, Georges,” Camille said, dancing back another step.  “But you would want to be.”  
  
Danton followed.  One step, predatory.  “She’s a child, Camille, as you said.”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Another step: his, Danton’s clumsy mirror of its grace.  
  
“Camille…”  
  
Another step.  Camille looked aside.  A display: the long, white line of his neck and the soft fall of his curls.  Camille the vulnerable.  
  
“It hurts,” he breathed, into the silence, and almost shivered at the sharp intake of Danton’s breath.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“It hurts to be cruel, and more to restrain our cruelty.”  He looked back up, then.  He looked straight into Danton’s eyes.  “You can be cruel with me, Georges.  I am the one person in all this world you cannot break.”  
  
“Careful, boy.”    
  
This time, Camille didn’t move away when Danton closed in.  His thick hand fell to Camille’s throat, rough and heavy.  Camille pressed into it, a gentle obstruction right until Danton’s fingers tightened and Camille’s breathing momentarily guttered like a candle.  
  
“I trust you,” he said, when he gathered enough air to speak again.  
  
“People have before.  They’re dead now.”  
  
“Not me.  Different contexts.  Different people.”  
  
“Will you stop me, Camille?”  
  
_Could I, if I even wanted to?_  
  
Though Danton couldn’t see, wasn’t so much as looking at him, Camille drew himself up tall and steady.  “No.”  
  
Most men would leave then, too afraid of their own desires, but Danton was not most men.  Perhaps that was why they all- the people, Camille- adored him.  They all used poor Danton, and right now it was Camille’s most intimate of turns.  It came then, like a spark of lightning: Danton’s backhanded slap seared across Camille’s cheek, rattling his teeth and ringing in his ears.  He was not Saint-Just, not a Stoic.  His eyes watered, though he laughed and raised wondering fingers to his cheek.  Found it wet: a beading line of blood where Danton’s heavy rings had torn him.  
  
“Is that enough for you?” Danton growled, though it sounded halfhearted.  
  
“More,” Camille said.  “You’ll find me insatiable.  Only have a care for where you leave marks.”  
  
“Lucile?”  
  
“Is well aware of my tastes.  No, I don’t want the whole Convention calling me your boy.”  
  
“Knowing,” Danton said.  “Knowing you are.  Now, show me how to fuck you.”  
  
_Show me how to drive out anyone else who has ever had your body._   Camille knew well enough that was what he meant.  
  
“Take it,” Camille murmured, rising up to fit their mouths together.  “There is no great secret beyond that.”  
  
There was, though, of course there was.  How should the mirror not know the dreams of a captured reflection?  Or a god not know the secret hearts of His worshipers?  And oh, how well Danton understood Camille’s innermost secrets, or perhaps he understood Danton’s.  Truth be entirely told, he could not tell now where one ended and the other began.

  
  
*

  
  
Camille woke to the feeling of a warm, damp cloth against his back, followed by the press of scarred lips.  Down they went, both following the line of his spine, over the curve of his buttocks.  Teeth then, a gentle bite while the hand with the cloth worked between his spreading legs, removing the lingering traces of release from Camille’s skin.  
  
“I hurt you,” Danton murmured, half question, half apology.  
  
“Yes,” Camille groaned.  “Wonderfully.”  
  
It was true.  His body still ached, his flesh pulpy beneath the skin like an overripe apple.  There was a thin swipe of blood on the pillow where Danton had pressed his cut cheek, and a ring of perfectly bloodied indentations forming a bruised aureole around one nipple.  His left hip remembered the crush of one broad hand where it had clutched to drag Camille back onto his thick cock, just as Camille's uncut cheek remembered the heel of Danton’s hand forcing his face down while the fingers pushed into his mouth and over his tongue.  
  
“I could become addicted to your charms, Camille,” Danton said, lifting his hair to kiss the back of his neck.  “Like you were to Mirabeau's _maraschino_.”  
  
“Mmn,” Camille murmured, rolling languidly onto his back to thread his fingers through Danton’s hair.  “I’m not so sweet.”  
  
“Is that so?”  
  
“Taste,” he said, slipping a hand down to lazily work his own cock.  
  
And then there was was nothing but the wet heat of Danton’s tender, curious mouth.  The press of his fingers, gentle this time, as if accustoming a virgin to pleasure.  
  
In the end, though, Camille pulled him up again.  His lips tasted of sweat and earlier release.  Camille sucked himself from Danton’s tongue, pushed up into the tight grip of his hand, and came apart with his wide-eyed reflection writ large in Danton’s eyes.

  
*

  
“You are all over words, my friend.”  
  
Morning, now, and Camille felt his eyes underlined by exhaustion and crusted with salt.  His tongue lay dry and swollen as a drought-struck riverbed.  He looked down and found that Danton was right: where he had been pushed down against the desk, spread across his scattered papers when Danton first stripped him, the words had been printed across his skin, smeared in places where sweat made them run.  
  
“What did you write of?” Danton asked, kissing each black freckle of lettering.  Tamed, now.  
  
“God.”  
  
“I thought you didn’t believe?”  
  
“You, then.”  
  
“That’s better.”

  
  
*

  
  
_The problem with making men into gods and mirrors,_ Camille wrote, _is this: gods fall, mirrors break._

**Author's Note:**

> Saint Just and Desmoulins were in correspondence with one another prior to Saint-Just being elected to the Convention. They also met one another personally prior to that time. At some point, we know there was a falling out between them in which Saint-Just, writing to another friend, stated that he had 'penetrated Desmoulins' soul' and come to the conclusion that his virtue was just a mask. This falling out, and their personal knowledge of one another, then wound up forming a significant undertone to Danton (and therefore Desmoulins') trial.
> 
> While any suggestions of Saint-Just being attracted to men are a matter of interpretation, Billaud-Varenne actually wrote directly about having sex with other young men. Hence Camille mentions him as a matter of contrasting the expressions of their sexuality.


End file.
